Free Mumbai Noir by Altaf Tyrewala Page A

rank, and pecking order than any Internet research could ever hope to find. Frightening place, this city now. A city of law-abiding folk. The night belongs to their expensive, million-PMPO car stereos and the screaming bikes of hyperpubescent idiots.
    Fuck the day the Mumbai evening dimmed into a night that was no longer Bombay.
    How did they douse the city in so much antiseptic? How did they get it so well behaved? Really, how do you turn Bombay into the least sexy city in the world?
    One of these days, I’ll have to get a job. Give up on the night. Give up picking on this nocturnal scab, hoping to see something that still makes sense, something that gives a man a sense of his place in the world, hoping to wake up one day at sunset to find I’m back home.
    They offered me a job in the early days of the new city. A parody of my earlier job. From guarding the door of the small gay drug-den pretending to be a nightclub to guarding by day the franchise coffee shop that replaced it. The landlord of the dilapidated building was trying to be kind. I know because he never had a sense of humor; certainly not one so cruel.
    Food. Few places remain where a man can still eat a meal cooked by human beings. Café Olympia. Holding out. For how long? Already citizens wait for tables, elbowing out the taxi drivers, who, by the way, already have the elbows of private air-conditioned cabs and pollution norms tucked well into their ribs. A dying breed—this tough, sleepless, uncouth, entertaining transporter. Black and yellow. The last remaining colors of a fading city.
    The waiter comes to my table. “Yes?”
    Yes? Yes?! Motherfucker, one of these days you’ll meet your real father, and he’ll hate you. You served me yesterday. And the day before. The same thing every day. And the day before that I was at that table being served by … that fellow—there! What’s his name?
    Fuck. I don’t know either.
    What’s your name?
    I don’t know.
    It’s just the fucking times. It’s just the damn city.
    “Mutton masala fry. Pav. Thums Up.”
    “Thums Up finished. Pepsi?”
    Fuck you and your whole family. “Okay.”
    I saw Guru the other day. Nice film. Bachchan’s son. I cried. They showed Bombay empty. Like the old days. Marine Drive with no cars. No buildings so ugly that you want to kill anyone called Contractor. Don’t know how they shot it. Must’ve done it with computers.
    It’s how Bombay looked the day I first came to work with the Pathan. Khansaab to many. Lala in his absence. Or Lalajaan, as my cheeky friend Shamim called him with a face so straight, he died a natural death many years later. I called him Abbu, for the few years I drove him around in his white Ambassador.
    Shamim had taken me straight from VT to Marine Drive. My first sight of the ocean. After twenty unblinking minutes, I turned to him and shook my head in amazement. He smiled.
    Then he took me to Lamington Road to meet Lala.
    I still remember the first time I met Abbu on a terrace, semireclining, a quivering man standing before him. Lala gently explaining that he had been avoiding violence toward him all these days because he was a simple man. A clean man. And the greatest protection of all, a family man. “The shop doesn’t belong to you. Yet we offer you a fair sum. I have given my word that this will be done. Don’t force me to hurt you. There is nothing I would hate more.”
    A forgotten man in a forgotten time, like many before but none since, he meant it. They had waited seven months before grabbing the man by the collar and dragging him up to the terrace. Not because anything or anyone protected him. In fact, precisely because nothing did.
    The bhais of my time were loath to harm common folk. The rich were fair game. The poor were slapped around without a care. It was the middle class that they held almost in some kind of reverent awe in those days of scarcity. They never forgot the courage it took to live a clean life and bring up children. If